End of the Night

One time back in New Orleans, before I got clean and sober, I was spending the night at Wayne’s drug house in the French Quarter. Wayne didn’t sell heroin (as far as I knew). One of the dealers, late into the evening when we’d become mellow on various things, asked me, “If your life depended on it, could you find a bag of heroin here in New Orleans before daybreak?”

Of course I could have. I knew the night well.

That dealer’s question has popped up in my mind from time to time since he posed it...